Serena Blog

In the next few weeks Serena is going to be announcing important new versions of our ALM, Release and Deploy solutions.

Ever since Serena’s CEO, Greg Hughes, introduced the concept of “Move Fast Without Breaking Things” at our User Conference in Washington DC in February, we have seen an overwhelming acknowledgement from our customers and partners that this is the perfect encapsulation of what modern application development and deployment means to them.

As the leader in deployment automation, Serena is a proud sponsor of the Jenkins User Conference 2015 World Tour. Come visit us at our booth and meet our experts in DevOps, CI/CD and enterprise release management.

Network Learn Explore @ the largest gathering of Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery experts on the planet.

Want to tap the collective knowledge of a vibrant community of CI/CD practitioners? How about

DevOps turned five last October, and while five years seems like a long time in terms of the technology adoption lifecycle, DevOps and Continuous Delivery still seem perched on the Enterprise IT chasm. The Pragmatists get it. They are under pressure from the business to deliver business value faster, better and more cheaply and the Visionaries and Early Adopters have proven that Continuous Delivery fits the bill.

So we are off and running with xChange 2015. Record crowds in the breakout sessions and a packed house for the kickoff general session this morning.

Greg Hughes talked about the need to “Move Fast Without Breaking Things” and his first love … a 128k RAM, twin 320kb floppy, 32lb “portable” computer. He drove home the critical need of modern organizations to create an infrastructure environment that supports dev teams

Today Serena Software launched our new community portal Serena Central which provides an enhanced user experience for customers and prospects looking to get the most out of their tools. The new site expands on our previous user communities focused around Build, Learn, and Connect.

What a terrific first meeting of the quarterly Dimensions CM Virtual User Group (VUG).

We were joined by one of our early adopters of the innovative Dimensions CM 14 release, Carmelette Benson of Health Care Service Corporation. The VUG was treated to an exceptional upgrade story that engaged the free Upgrade Lab to advance their planning and readiness, and worked collaboratively with

Once the developer checks in a change, how long does it take your organization to deliver it to the customer? The path to production can take many turns, have many dips, and fall short in terms of quality and expectations. IT organizations struggle with major process and toolchain gaps between develop, build, deploy, and release. Come join us at the December Serena DevOps Drive-in as Julian

How do you become a high performance IT organization? Earlier in the year we had Glenn O’Donnell of Forrester on our Serena DevOps Drive-in webcast to answer this question. Glenn outlined the fact that we are in the beginning of an IT industrial revolution: IT is currently too slow, has poor quality and customers don’t trust IT. This current state has

Technical blog posts

SBM Patch Context can often confuse SBM users, so I have put together a slide and this blog to explain. The slide may look busy but please look at it as a story and timeline, working from the top left across and then down through time.

Some fundamentals:

When you Publish a Process App it get assigned auto-generated versions for design elements and then one for the actual whole Process App. This numbering is consecutive and system controlled. The highest version in main line is considered to be the TIP (or HEAD).

Back to Single Sign-On again. Today, we are not talking about Serena Single Sign-On so much, but having the user automatically authenticated using the user credentials logged on to the workstation. I refer to this as auto-logon using Kerberos or NTLM credentials of the workstation user.

The browser needs to be capable of auto-logon using the WWW-Authenticate header; it is the browser that makes auto-logon possible. Chrome has this ability built in, and you can specify sites to do this auto-logon in Firefox. Neither Firefox nor Chrome use the Security Zones that Internet Explorer uses.

Serena Central has various videos on how to perform certain functions within SBM which are great if you are already familiar with the solution. I learn something new every day from these great videos.

But how do you get started if you are new to SBM?

In this post, we will build a simple, intuitive process common to everyone-- Vacation Request!

I have both a video and document that will show you from start to finish how to create a new application consisting of the typical elements: workflow, fields and forms. Then deploy it to an environment and test it out.

It is so easy to open Composer, make a "little" change and click Quick Deploy. But, is a Quick Deploy sometimes too quick? Have you ever waited patiently for the "Deployment Completed" message only to realize that you deployed to production instead of staging? Or, maybe you didn't realize what happened until users started to call about sudden strange behavior... Don't feel bad. It's happened to a lot of administrators. We hear from customers all the time who have deployed something to production by mistake and now need to rollback.

Here we will discuss how to prevent a quick 2 minute change from becoming a long 2 hour recovery exercise.

The REST API is a newly available API published in Dimensions 14.2. It presents a simple and light weight method of querying a Dimensions CM repository. By use of the HTTP Get method and returns results in JSON format.

In this PDF tutorial several methods will be used to demonstrate as to how these resources can be accessed.

Cherry Picking is a new and powerful enhancement to the merge capabilities with in Dimensions CM, allowing for greater control and precision over what changes will be merged by cherry picking specific requests.

The email notification mechanism is a powerful and high configurable system for providing email notifications to specific users whenever user-defined trigger events occur. For example, notifications can be sent when a deployment finishes or an approval is required.

A complete example procedure for setting up an email notification, when requesting an application process. In the linked in the PDF file: SDA 6 Email notification tutorial, and is a fully re-worked version of the guide for 5.x.

I've seen this come up in the forum a few times lately. So, I thought I'd write a blog on how to use indexOf() in a form action. This can be used for many things. The most common use is to make another field required based on multiple selections either in a multiselect field or across multiple fields. However, once you know how to evaluate and compare multiple values with indexOf, you can really do whatever you want with the results.

So, what is indexOf()? In javascript, indexOf() searches for the position of a string value. So, for example, if I have "Hello World", "Hello World".indexOf("l"); would return the position that the first occurrance of the letter "l" was in. In this case, it is 2 because the first position is always 0. So, H = 0, e = 1, l = 2, and so on. Additionally, if I search for a larger string like, "Hello World".indexOf("World"); the value returned is based on the first position where my search string is found. So, in this case it would be 6 because the "W" of "World" is in the 6th position. If the search string does not exist, it returns -1. So, "Hello World".indexOf("fdg"); would result in -1. Unlike how we count, javascript return values always start at 0 rather than 1. It may seem strange at first, but it will serve a purpose later.

Many of us will have come across the S047 abend ("An unauthorized program issued a restricted Supervisor Call (SVC) instruction") that we cannot immediately explain. We know that our executable library is authorised (or authorized, for those reading in North America). We have double checked member PROGxx in SYS1.PARMLIB or re-issued our ‘SETPROG APF’ command but this has failed to explain the problem. Therefore there must be something seriously and fundamentally wrong with the application or the execution environment, yes?

Well, no. Usually not, at least. However, where do we start investigating potential causes of the abend? Here is a quick checklist to set the wheels in motion.

You can see this pie chart in action within the app central "Subtaskless voting" process app uploaded by yours truly. This can only be used on browsers which support canvas.

While SBM provides robust reporting, it is generally based on items. Within a given item, however, you may want to provide some graphical analysis based on information gathered throughout the item's lifespan on a form. This may be a vote count, counts of an inventory, percentage of individuals having approved vs. yet to approve, etc.

If you have this data in numeric fields, a canvas html script can render a graph of the counts. If the counts are numbers of entries in fields, you may need to run some javascript to get these numbers to then generate the graph.

The following zip file contains the code used to create an html widget in the noted process app for a graph. This can only be used in browsers that support html canvas. This example is also un-stylized, using simple colors and no css, but remains a fine simple example of how data can be easily displayed graphically with minimal coding.

Dimensions CM Bridge is a connector between a Subversion enabled client and a CM server that enables:

• Your development tools to talk to a CM repository instead of Subversion. • Development teams familiar with Subversion to continue using their existing IDEs and tools with the additional benefits of Dimensions CM. • Dimensions CM to be used with IDEs that do not have a "native" integration with CM but do support Subversion.

Another customer issue that pops up from time to time is the inability to obtain a dump from the CMN ZMF ISPF client. The actual abends can be unexpected or deliberate and related to issues within the product, environment or customizations.

So, how can we get something more useful out of ZMF than messages such as “Abend 0C4000 hex occurred processing command 'CMNINIT '.”?

It’s hard to believe that it is has been nearly a year since the release of Dimensions CM 14.1, the most significant release of Dimensions CM in a decade. Over the last year we’ve been amazed by both it's rapid adoption and the rave reviews that it has achieved. However, we've not used this as an excuse to stand still with the Dimensions R&D team continuing the pace of innovation in the Serena Labs, and in July this year we will be releasing the first major update to the CM 14 platform - Dimensions CM 14.2.

Over the next few weeks I’m going to be penning a number of blogs introducing you to the new features that are coming next month. This is the first in that series, and I’m going to use it to introduce you to the platform changes in Dimensions CM 14.2 through the sections below (the full platform matrix is available on the Serena Support Site).